Old Osceola Stories Best Halloween Tales

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What used to be a one-time-a-year sugar binge for kids, a night to dress up and pretend and get the willies, just isn't anymore.

Now it's a specter of evil in so many eyes.

It's the idea that Halloween really represents a celebration of the dark side of spiritual life.

Maybe so, maybe not. I have good friends who believe both ways.

All I know is, it never seemed that bad years ago, especially when we just dressed up as hobos, or fairy princesses, or clowns and tried to max out on goodies.

Back then, Halloween also was a time for telling ghost stories by moonlight, working on that willies factor. No more.

In memory of the Halloween that used to be - the one where, guilt-free, you could swap ghost stories - we have a sampler for you.

These are things that really go bump in the Osceola night.

Or did, even if they aren't mentioned much anymore.

I didn't see them. I didn't hear them. Chances are, neither did you. But good people did. For some, they're explainable; for others, they're not. Ever.

The first one concerns the old Parker place, a two-story ranch house that used to be in south Osceola, between lakes Jackson and Marian. Today, the house is gone, only rubble remains, and the site is part of the Prairie Lakes State Preserve in the Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area.

But more than a hundred years ago, according to the legend, an outlaw by the name of Parker sold cattle to Cuba and got paid in gold coin.

''The story was, he buried some out there, a whole chest full,'' said Keetly Bass, 74, who used to run cattle through the area. ''All the stories originated from that.''

The stories included some strange ones, stories about a headless man who rode a horse in the woods and hammocks near the old place, which stood vacant for decades.

People went there because the Parker place was the only one for miles around where you could get good, clear well water. Ranchers would camp there at night, but they didn't all stay in the house. You couldn't close all the doors. When you shut the last one, another would open. Bass said that was a draft, just the way the house was built.

Mabel Albritton, 76, said she grew up hearing some of those stories.

One prominent old rancher, whom she didn't want named, said the horseman chased him, she recalled.

''He was camping out there one night. It was a moonlit night,'' she recounted. ''There was an old gate about a mile from the house,'' at what now is Canoe Creek Road, and he was riding in that direction.

''Then he looked behind him and saw a man on a white horse. Where the man's head was, it was just flat.'' He began following the rancher, she said. ''If he wouldrun, it would run. If he would walk, it would walk. Finally he got scared. He ran his horse till he just about killed it.

''When he hit Canoe Creek Road, he turned towards Canoe Creek and kept the horse at it till he got almost there.''

Fact or fiction? Albritton said the man who told the story was a respected rancher, the kind of person whose word was a valuable thing to him. And over the years, people would go out to the site and dig for the treasure chest.

Bass, the former cow man, recalled a somewhat similar legend over in Turkey Hammock, west of the Parker place, about a headless man wearing a white shirt and black pants, appearing on the road.

But Bass had a practical explanation after seeing it himself.

''It was one of these big stumps,'' he said, that had been burned. ''The top was white and the bottom was black,'' and in the headlights, it could look like a headless man. ''That's what that was.''

Who knows?

Bass said he also was convinced that another mysterious phenomenon, a light that has been reported in the Parker slough, was nothing more than fireflies swarming together.

Albritton didn't quite buy that explanation, particularly since she actually saw the light one night years ago when she and a couple of other people went with her husband, Remer, while he patrolled the area as a game warden.

They saw a light over toward the swamp, and Remer Albritton and the other man went to investigate, thinking they might be able to surprise an illegal night hunter.

It wasn't any hunter. The light rose and moved through the swamp for some distance before going down behind the vegetation and disappearing. They never found out what it was, but Remer Albritton told them he had heard about the light since he was a boy.

But don't go running down there tonight to find it. The light only shows up in the month of June.

Last one:

One night, Remer Albritton and another man, both mindful of the legends and spooky stories surrounding the Parker place, decided to camp there, just off the front porch.

They spread out some palmetto leaves right below the porch, lit their campfire and began cooking hunks of bacon.

When the first one was done, Albritton took it out of the pan and put it on the palmetto leaves. A moment later, the men looked down and the bacon was gone. That cranked up the hairs on the backs of some necks.

When the second piece of bacon was done, they put it on the palmetto leaves, too. But they watched it. Quick as a flash, a black paw darted out and scooped up the bacon, pulling it beneath the porch. A little bit later, the cow dogs rousted a big black cat from beneath the house.